Dispatches from Bushwick, 1999

Before I Knew Autofiction Was a Thing

My mother called me recently, very excited because she had found some of my old writing from almost thirty years ago. She’s always been my biggest cheerleader about my writing and has saved everything I ever sent her. Before she mailed the stories to me, she read them all again and gave me what I consider my highest compliment: that my stories were funny.

I started writing in my twenties—stories about my father and my experiences living in unconventional apartments and lofts. I didn’t know autofiction was a thing. I was just drawing from personal experience, because my life at the time often felt stranger than fiction.

I’m going to post some excerpts from those old pieces here. This one is from the first few pages of one of the stories my mom sent. It’s about when I was living in a loft in the infamous McKibbin Lofts in East Williamsburg—really Bushwick—in the late '90s, early 2000s. Before that, I had been staying with Sana, a friend of my mom’s from college, in her red brick cape in St. Albans, Queens. She generously let me live there for free in exchange for watering her plants, and I didn’t hold up my end of the bargain. It was so far away, I’d often call my friends just to let them know I had made it home, hours after they had.

When I finally started looking for a new place, I had so many wild experiences. The cat lady in the story below was real. I looked at places with beds in the kitchen, cubby-like coffins built into ceilings, storage units being passed off as lofts, and eventually spent a year living with an aspiring fashion designer and pseudo-dominatrix in Bushwick. I’d been searching for what felt like forever, and when I found the McKibbin space, the price was right, so I ignored a lot of red flags, like the fact that the loft had no walls.

Reading these old stories reminds me to keep going. There’s so much material to work with, and it’s a good reminder that the best work often comes from simply paying attention to your own life.

Let me know what you think. This is the first few pages of that old story, I’ll post what happened once I moved in next week

!

Loft Living: A New York Story

When I moved to New York City after college, I was living so far out in Queens that it was practically Long Island. My subway stop was the last one on the E and then I had to take a 15 min bus ride on a bus that ran every 15 minutes.

“I can’t believe you moved all of the way from Indiana to live in New York City’s Indiana,” my father used to say.

My mother left New York City and my father in the 70s to raise me in suburbia. He stayed put and hasn’t budged since. You can usually find him in one of three places– his apartment where he writes poetry, his stoop where recites poetry or his favorite bar where he attempts to give me fatherly advice while he asks me for money to keep his vodka on the rocks flowing. The fact that I lived in Queens really bothered him, much more than the fact that I didn't have a job. Not having a job was Bohemian, living in Queens was not.

“Well, if you didn’t live in an anarchist squat with no heat, just two steps away from Avenue D, I could be living with you,” I had told him during one of our weekly visits. “Did you know that the “D” stands for danger, death or dope depending on what time of day it is?”

“My father narrowed his eyes and slurped his vodka through the missing gap in his bridge. He tugged one of his wooly, gray curls with his long brown fingers – took a drag of his Camel unfiltered– and blew the smoke in my face.

“You got to get a new place, Gracie,” he said and slid off his barstool. He slowly shuffled out of the door, like a drunk sailor from a cartoon, but instead of weaving from side to side, he lurched forward and seemed to trip over his feet. He used to walk so fast when I was child I could barely keep up with him on my short chubby, legs. But one day he woke up and he had a severe limp that left him dependent on carved, wooden canes and a bright, yellow bicycle. He blamed his crippled state on his last wife, some German woman I had never met, who could allegedly cast spells, or on a malfunctioning electric blanket. It really depended on his mood.

But, he was right, I did need a new place. I was living with my mother’s old friend from college rent-free until I could find my own place. She was an artist who traveled the world and each inch of her small, brick house was filled with tree-shaped ceramic pieces, hanging baskets and jungle-like plants. Late at night, we bonded over seaweed salad and hearts of palm sprinkled with sesame seeds from a Korean deli. It would have been perfect if it were in Manhattan or even Brooklyn, but it was on 193rd Street and 120th Avenue in Queens.

Looking for a place to live in New York City is just like doing everything in New York City, a pain in the ass, so I paid $200 to a roommate-finding service, FIND-A-ROOMMATE or something like that. The service promised me that they would match me with pre-screened people with similar interests and values. The first place I looked at was in an East Village project. I had never considered living in a project, but the rent was very cheap, $500 per month. I imagined myself dodging bullets and befriending crackheads as I left for work each morning and chuckling to myself because I had cheaper rent than anyone else I knew. I would have moved my stuff right in, except the lady who I would be renting from was a chain smoker with five cats and her main mode of transportation was a motorized, wheelchair scooter with a basket on the front. She answered the door wearing a grease-stained, white nightgown and her graying, black hair stuck to her meaty, pink arms. Several cats ran in between and around her legs.

“Do you like cats?” she said as she puffed on her cigarette.

“Umm. We had cats when I was growing up. But, usually just one at a time.”

“Honey, you can never have too many cats, just like men! Come in!”

I took a tentative step into the apartment, but somehow managed to trip on the ramp she had placed in the doorway. I fell flat on my back; my skirt hiked up at my hips. I stared up at the rust-stained ceiling and pictured the two of us with our matching basket wheelchairs getting groceries and picking up men - twenty-some year olds for me and their grandpas for her. I managed to pull myself to my feet and brushed the cat hair off my legs. She led to the dark cave of a room I would be living in. Cat Lady told me she slept on the couch. A brown and gray crocheted afghan was folded up on a sagging futon and perched on top of the blanket was another cat. “That’s Ashes,” she said. “You’ll get to know them all. So when do you want to move in?” she asked. She circled around me with her wheelchair. I felt like she was trying to hypnotize me into taking the apartment with her wire basket. I had to do something fast, I was getting very sleeeeepy.

“I can’t live here!” I yelled and ran for the door. “You smoke and I can’t live with a smoker.”

“You’ll breathe the air in New York City, but you won’t live with a smoker?” she yelled out after me into the hall.

“And that’s how I ended up living with Roxanne. After meeting Cat Lady, and looking at apartments inhabited by Dog Boy and Cold Sore Girl, living with Roxanne seemed like it would be OK. We talked on the phone first, and she told me she was an aspiring fashion designer who had a debilitating illness that doctors didn’t know how to cure. She needed a roommate for her loft in Williamsburg, a trendy area of Brooklyn, but she was too sick to show it to me. She was recovering from this plague-like syndrome at her mother’s house in Long Island and wanted to know if I was willing to take the train to meet her. After Roxanne assured me that what she had wasn’t contagious I said I would.

The first thing I noticed about her mother’s house walls were covered in crucifixes of all shapes, designs and materials. There were realistic ones where Jesus dripped oily, fake blood and there were abstract ones made of wood and straw. There were enough to decorate several cathedrals. Roxanne was lying down in the middle of the living room, her arms stretched out like the hundreds of Jesus’ lining the walls.

Roxanne’s hair was long with stringy strands that hung from head like an Afghan dog, red and blue ribbons punctuated the ends, brushing her shoulders like bicycle streams. She was tall and lanky– her baggy blue pajamas sagged off her thin limbs. Her pale skin was absent of any color, except for the charcoal like smudges ringing each eye. When she finally spoke, I was surprised to hear that it was low and gruff, like a man.